PagePlus was a desktop publishing program developed by Serif for Microsoft Windows. The first version was released in 1991 as the first commercial sub-£100 DTP package for Microsoft Windows. The final release was PagePlus X9, which was released in November 2016. In June 2019 it was officially replaced by Serif with Affinity Publisher.
History
PagePlus was first launched in 1990 and was the first sub-£100 desktop publishing program for Windows 3.0. Three years later, in spring 1993, PagePlus 2 was released and provided full colour printing support. Following this release, a new version of the product was released on a roughly annual basis. Serif did a complete rewrite of the original program source code for the release of PagePlus version 8. Despite the rewrite, at that time the program name was retained and the version number was simply incremented. Again despite the rewrite the program remained able to read data files created in previous versions 1 to 7.
Discontinuation of PagePlus
Serif announced that PagePlus X9 was to be the final PagePlus release. The last build issued to date is v19.0.2.22 from 28 April 2017. Serif ceased further development of all "Plus" products to focus efforts on their 'Affinity' product line. Serif began rewriting their DTP software, to allow a multi-platform implementation, and allow new methods of internal program operation with more modern Operating Systems and the typical current configuration of PCs. A public beta of Serif's Affinity Publisher was launched in the summer of 2018.
Overview
While PagePlus was generally targeted at the "entry level" DTP user, some of the functionality present in the market leading applications is present in PagePlus, such as working in the CMYK colour space, OpenType Feature support, and Optical margin alignment. PagePlus also has the ability to view, create, edit and publish PDF files, and publish E-books in *.epub or *mobi formats suitable for the Kindle store. It also includes support for EPUB3 fixed layout eBooks for textbooks, children's books etc. PagePlus is primarily written in C++ using Visual Studio 2008, with a heavy dependence on the MFC framework. The Windows GDI library was discarded early in development in favour of an in-house composition engine supporting advanced bitmap and typeface operations. The text engine supports Unicode text entry.
The format of the.ppp data file has also evolved over time. Until the switch to an XM-based format with version X3, each release of PagePlus could read current and previous version data file formats. Before X3 there was no facility to save back into an earlier format, so a modified file could not be read by any version previous to the version that was last used to save it. Howeve,r once the change was made to XML format at X3, later data files from release X4 to X9 inclusive could be read by earlier versions, though with the loss of any unsupported features. The backwards compatibility of being able to read older non-XML.ppp datafile versions was dropped from later 64-bit PagePlus releases. As a result, PPX6 is the last release that can read PP5 and PP3 format data files after a standard install on a Windows 64-bit system. To read older files with PagePlus versions X7, X8 and X9 on a 64-bit Windows system, a special manual 32-bit PagePlus installation must be done from the program disc or downloaded file. Also, when Serif ended development of PagePlus with version X9 and began concentrating on its Affinity line, they did not include in Affinity Publisher the ability to import.ppp format files from the X6–X9 versions into Affinity; neither did they provide a batch conversion program into Affinity format. This upset many long-time PagePlus users, who felt they had supported the company for many years, and often had hundreds of documents in the.ppp format. Serif's suggestion was to redo the document in Affinity Publisher, or export the file in.pdf format, and then import into Affinity. Many users did not feel this was adequate.
